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Assistance Funding to Syria: For Development or Strife?

Mr. Kourany has worked in the medical and humanitarian fields, focusing on safety and security analysis, primarily on Turkey and his native Syria. Ms. Myers has worked for more than three decades on development, humanitarian and emergency assistance in Palestine and Syria, as well as in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen and the Sultanate of Oman. She is the board chair of Eye to the Future, a nonprofit that assists Syrians affected by the conflict. This paper was developed from a presentation at a Research and Policy workshop on "Development Strategies for Conflict Areas in the Middle East" co-sponsored by the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, in December 2016.

On the eve of conflict in March 2011, Syria was a repressive, middle-income country of 22-23 million people in which wealth was heavily aggregated at the top of the pyramid. Abrogation of human rights was routine and widespread.1 The term "middle income" belies the pronounced societal and economic inequality in Syria, where government institutions lacked accountability and were plagued by corruption. Members of the ruling Assad family and their inner circle are said to own and control a major portion of the Syrian economy.2 It must also be noted that Syria enjoyed extremely high literacy rates of approximately 90 percent, immunization rates for childhood diseases nearing 90 percent, and a population that was quite well nourished, in part due to unsustainable subsidies on food, thanks to Syria's fairly small oil and gas reserves.3

Exacerbating the political repression and economic challenges, four consecutive years of drought led up to the outbreak of protests in 2011. Such was the impact of the drought, and government responses so ineffective, that approximately 200,000 farmers and their families were displaced from their lands, moving into urban slums encircling Syria's cities in search of scarce day labor. Thus, Syria's conflict has been steeped in a complex brew of politics, economics and climate change.

The grotesque mismanagement of protests when they first erupted in the Arab Spring of 2011 condemned the country to the misery of the past six years (and counting). Unarmed citizens who did not call for regime change but merely for reforms were shot, arrested, tortured and disappeared. It was these government actions that sparked the armed resistance, an escalation many Syrians view as having been necessary to protect nonviolent protesters.

Six years later, more than 5 million Syrians are refugees and close to 7 million are internally displaced4 — more than half of Syria's original population driven from their homes. The counting of the dead stopped in 2014 at 250,000.5 Responsible estimates suggest approximately half a million dead now and 2 million injured, many of whom are permanently disabled;6 life expectancy has declined by 20 years. UNICEF estimates a loss of human capital valued at $10.5 billion due to cessation of schooling for Syrian children. It is estimated that at least $100-200 billion will be required to reconstruct the country's roads, electrical and water systems, and other infrastructure. Under the most favorable economic circumstances, a modest estimate of 20 years would be required to return the economy to pre-conflict GDP levels.7

We argue that donor funding in and around the Syrian civil war is profoundly politicized and actually fuels conflict by enabling and engendering multiple actors and contradictory agendas, even when it is asserted that the money is intended to foster the conditions for peace, promote moderation, meet humanitarian needs, and reduce or oppose extremism. The funding efforts directed at Syria are often uncoordinated and could be described as "driving blind." This is redundant and wasteful, causing harm to vulnerable Syrians. We will introduce the actors in the conflict, discuss strategy and conflict drivers, and then address the question of funding and how if fuels the conflict.

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